Fifty years after Barbados and fellow Commonwealth Caribbean countries first boldly proclaimed their independence from Britain, a University of the West Indies professor is warning the region that legally, it is still not free

Fifty years after Barbados and fellow Commonwealth Caribbean countries first boldly proclaimed their independence from Britain, a University of the West Indies professor is warning the region that legally, it is still not free. Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Professor David Berry issued the warning this morning as he addressed the opening of a three-day conference at the university’s Law Faculty entitled, Legal History and Empire: Perspectives from the Colonized. He explained that “in some of the Commonwealth Caribbean countries, we have something called a savings law clause or existing law clause, and this means that any law in force before independence, that was not changed at independence, is saved and cannot be challenged by our local judges”. Berry further pointed out that those laws had been allowed to remain in place even though “the Inter-American Court Of Human Rights has asked Barbados and some of the other countries to change these clauses in their constitutions”.